A Linguistic Strategies to Express Humor in Thai Context

Abstract

The main purpose of this research is to explore the ways that humor is expressed, taking into account linguistic strategies used. Speech act categorization, cooperative principle and implicatures are the frameworks applied in this research. The source of data for analysis is five Thai situation comedies. From a speech-act theoretical perspective, the findings demonstrate that there are six categories of humor-related speech acts: expressing condescension, boasting, blaming, threatening, satire and teasing. These strategies, on the whole, indicate that humor in Thai situation comedies is closely associated with an emotion of superiority and aggression created by the speaker. The study also shows that humor can be carried out by non-observance of the cooperative principle in two ways: violating a maxim and flouting a maxim. In the first case, the maxim was found to have been flouted and revealed instances of conversational implicatures. In the second case, furthermore, conversational implicature were generated, but as a result of maxim violation. What is peculiar to the findings of the study is that humor can be brought about by a speaker intentionally telling a lie to confuse the hearer or audience. Later, when the speaker reveals that he/she him/herself is held responsible for a maxim violation, laughter and thus humor ensue. Aside from this, there is only one example of humor-related conventional implicaturesfound